Well, one copy of Red Faction: Armageddon showed up at Kotaku's LA offices this week, so why not give it a spin this weekend, I say. I'll be playing Volition's latest while also burning my way through more of L.A. Noire.

But my primary concern is front-loading on sleep and getting some pre-E3 2011 stories written, impressions of games that you'll read more about next week. Hopefully, that should make for some less harried impressions pieces and more time spent on the E3 2011 show floor. (And hopefully that means some hands-on time with Dark Souls, which should be online and playable at the show.)

What about you? Playing anything good this weekend? Anything you're particularly excited about at next week's E3 show? Hit us in the comments.

Having appeared in every other SSX game released to-date, the franchises' generic male character, Mac, is definitely making a reappearance in the 2012 reboot.

I suppose not every character in SSX needs to either be a hot female or a guy with an over-the-top personality. Mac here represents the baggy-pantsed everyman, or at least every college age white man.

We've actually grown up with Mac Fraser. According to the SSX Wiki, he started off 15-years-old in the original SSX; aged to 18 in SSX 3; and was 20 in SSX on Tour. By the time the new SSX rolls out in January 2012, he should be dangerously close to too old for this shit.

Sony's new gaming portable is priced just right, at least in the company's eyes. In fact, the NGP's price was determined before they started designing the dual-thumbstick portable.

While Sony Computer Entertainment's head of worldwide studios Shuhei Yoshida declined to tell Kotaku the official price for the NGP, something we suspect may be unveiled at E3 next week, he did talk about the reasoning behind how they set that price, how their new gaming device learned from some of the missteps of the Playstation Portable and what the executive makes of rival Nintendo's lackluster 3DS sales.

Back when Sony initially starting development on their Next Generation Portable they set an internal target price they wanted to hit for the launch of the system, Yoshida said in an interview last month.

"I feel very comfortably that we are going to be hitting it," he said. "We definitely consider this is the price that it has to be for people to even consider purchasing it."

The target price was set knowing that "at the end of the day gaming portable devices may not be something people feel like they need," he added.

Sony also looked at many other things, like the cost of the goods needed to create the device and the pricing of other similar devices. They also considered what they may be bundling with the final hardware, Yoshida said, raising the possibility that the device may come with pre-loaded games or other software or accessories.

Yoshida said the team is still looking at different bundle possibilities. Sony has already determined that there will be both a 3G version and Wifi only version. They also suspect there will be different bundles for different regions of the world.

The notion of setting a price based on what competitors charge raises the question of what Sony believes is a direct competitor to a device that is so thoroughly about gaming on the go.

What separates the NGP from the rest, Yoshida said, is its "unique gaming capabilities." Things like having dual analog sticks, something he called a huge differentiator. Something, I can't help but agree with after having spent hours playing games on the device.

"You feel how natural it is to navigate through 3D space,"he said. "That is one big feature that separates it from other things. As we show more from the social activity features I hope people will see that the NGP is new and different."

The NGP also has motion-sensing, front and back touch sensitivity and cameras.

Surprisingly, Yoshida tells me that Sony wasn't convinced the device should have that second touch pad on the back of the device initially. It wasn't until he experiences what it could add to a game that he became a believer.

"We were evaluating whether to put a touch panel in the NGP," he said. "We weren't sure we wanted it. But when I had a chance to play Little Deviants I was like 'This is why we need to include it.'"

That's why Little Deviants remains one of Yoshida's favorite games on the device, he said.

"I'd like everyone to try Little Deviants," he said.

Typically Sony doesn't like to talk directly about their competitors, Yoshida tells me when I ask him about Nintendo's 3DS. But I press him. Why do you think the 3DS isn't doing as well as some, including Nintendo apparently, expected. Could it be that the iPhone and devices like it have cannibalized the portable gaming market so significantly that it can't support gaming-only devices?

Yoshida capitulates then, but only to discuss the broader issue I raise.

"We are not directly competing with these systems," he says. "We have to really create the reason for people to look at the NGP and say, 'This is what I want.'

"There are more and more options people have now for devices to play games on."

Yoshida said that while Sony doesn't often talk about the competition, they certainly watch them.

"We talked about that a lot in our office," he said of the 3DS' launch. "We have been watching closely the reaction of other people to the 3DS."

But Yoshida said he came to a different conclusion than the one I suggested, that maybe people don't want stand-alone portable gaming devices anymore.

"I think there are a combination of things," he said about the 3DS' launch. "It could have been the line-up of titles. It could have been about the 3D stereoscopic capabilities. It could be about many other things."

"I was a bit surprised about how (the 3DS) is doing," he added before saying he didn't want to discuss the competitor anymore.

The Next Generation Portable won't use Sony's funky, flawed UMD to play games. It was the persnickety UMD drive that some point to as the PSP's chief issue. It also won't be a device that can only download games like the PSPgo. But we don't know exactly yet how game sales will work for the NGP.

Sony has said it will use a new proprietary memory card for game storage, but that doesn't preclude the NGP using other ways for gamers to purchase games.

One idea floated that bubbled as a rumor was that Sony would install kiosks in retail stores that would allow gamers to bring in their NGP or its memory card, purchase a game and install it directly on the device. In theory, the system wouldn't cut retailers out of the formula, would remove the need for physical boxes and would cut down on the excessive download times that PSPgo owners faced with big-game purchases online.

I asked Yoshida about the rumor and their relationship with retailers like GameStop in light of the PSPgo, which did essentially cut them out of game sales.

He assured me that games like Uncharted Golden Abyss for the NGP will be sold both in a physical packages and in an online store. That way people have a choice, he said.

He also pointed out that retailers are becoming increasingly comfortable with selling voucher cards for Sony's online store. But what about those kiosks?

"I don't know if we've publicly talked about that yet," he said. "There has been some speculation from the media and we discussed something like that as an option."

It wouldn't be the first time such a system existed, Yoshida pointed out.

When he was a kid, he said, he would bring a disc card from his family's Nintendo Family Computer Disc System to a store to load it up with new games.

"That is an interesting scheme," he said.

Are superpowers a blessing or a curse? Are mutants more like ethnic minorities, or queer people? For too long, TV shows and movies have been asking these same old questions, without really finding any interesting answers.

So it's a pleasure to watch a movie like X-Men: First Class, which blows past these tired old questions, to give us some new ones. For the first time in eight years, the big screen versions of America's favorite mutants feel like they have cool places to go.

Spoilers ahead!

The "are superpowers a blessing or a curse" thing is really overplayed, and X-Men: First Class mostly sidesteps this cliché. Instead, superpowers are just part of who you are, and they're also skills, to be mastered and improved. It's like asking if red hair is a blessing or a curse, or the ability to yodel.

So X-Men: First Class breathes new life into Marvel's most overexposed set of characters by going back to 1962 and recounting the origins of Professor X, Magneto and their respective mutant followers. It mostly works, because of a strong focus on the characters, especially Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr. Where the movie doesn't work, it's because it's trying to do too much in one film, or because the plot is a bit silly, or because some bits simply don't work. But more on that later.

The movie's focus on character development absolutely does work - because once you recognize that your superpowers are just a part of who you are, a strong focus on character is obviously the best way to talk about mutant powers. And especially when it comes to Charles and Erik, the film manages to explore the idea that they both have major blind spots, which are both character flaws and a hindrance in using their powers fully. Charles can read and control minds, but his own smugness keeps him from understanding people. Erik can control metal and magnetism, but his rage keeps him from using his powers properly.

And it's definitely in the portrayal of these two iconic characters that the film shines the most. Any time James McAvoy (who plays Charles) or Michael Fassbender (who plays Erik) is on the screen, the movie just clicks. Michael Fassbender, in particular, has a few incredibly emotional scenes in which Erik's grief and rage feel absolutely present.

The movie follows both men from childhood. Charles starts out as an overprivileged British kid whose biggest problem is an absentee mother, then goes on to get a PhD in mutantology from Oxford. Erik, meanwhile, gets sent to a concentration camp as a small child, only to watch his mother die at the hands of a sadistic Nazi. Erik becomes a totally awesome Nazi-hunter, while Charles becomes fascinated with learning about this fellow mutants. The two meet when it turns out the Nazi who killed Erik's mother is also the #1 evil mutant.

The relationship between Charles and Erik has never been as fascinating - or as slash-ficcy - as it is here. They both help each other grow as people, and Charles especially helps Erik learn to work with others, and to find the space "between rage and serenity" where he can fully use his magnetic powers. McAvoy and Fassbender have amazing chemistry together, and their scenes involve a lot of tenderness and mutual understanding. You can really glimpse the potential for these two to become another Kirk and Spock, or maybe Luke and Han. The rise and fall of the Charles/Erik bromance goes way, way beyond a political alliance that splinters into disagreement.

After their first encounter with Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), the former Nazi and current genocidal mutant, Charles and Erik start tracking down other mutants, forming the first proto-team of X-Men. (You'll hear the "Montage" song from Team America: World Police playing in your head a few times.)

And a lot of the middle section of the film has to do with preparing the newbie mutants to face their first real challenge. The interesting thing is, about half the mutants need to learn to master their powers. And the other half seem to have mastered their powers already, but need to learn to accept themselves as mutants. So the two tracks run simultaneously: learning to control your inner resources and strengthen your mutant muscles, and learning to accept who you really are, without hiding your true nature. So in a sense, mutant powers are both a skillset that need to be strengthened, and a form of identity that needs to be embraced. Like I said earlier, it's a nice way around the same old questions about mutant powers that you tend to see over and over.

At the center of the "accepting your mutant self" storyline is Raven, aka Mystique, who's been Charles Xavier's friend since childhood but is having a harder time finding her place now. She can make herself look like a normal girl, but her natural state is the blue spiky nakedness that Rebecca Romijn made famous in the first few movies. And even though Charles pays lip-service to mutant pride, he mostly wants Raven to keep her mutant awesomeness on the downlow. (And Charles, in keeping with his general smugness, doesn't appreciate how lucky he is to have an invisible mutation.)

Meanwhile, Raven falls for the sexy nerd Hank McCoy, another mutant who also "pass" for normal - except for his big prehensile feet. The only trouble is, Hank is a self-hating mutant who wants to find a way to erase all outward signs of his difference while keeping his superpowers.

The absolute best thing about X-Men: First Class is that it doesn't make any of this stuff look easy. It's all a struggle, as some of the most powerful scenes in the film make clear. Like one great sequence where the young proto-X-Men watch helplessly as a ton of people are slaughtered in front of them. Or some of the scenes where Erik, Charles and Raven talk about whether it's better to try and adapt to society, or make society adapt to you. Learning to be powerful and proud takes a lot of work.

There are other ways in which this film avoids asking the same old questions. For example, various characters talk about the idea that mutants are destined to drive humanity to extinction, in exactly the same way humans once wiped out Neanderthals. This is a notion that Grant Morrison bandied about in his New X-Men comics, but I don't remember the movies dealing with it before.

So like I said, the movie mostly works. When it doesn't work, it's usually because the film is trying to cram too much X-Men continuity into one two-hour movie. Or because a few of the requisite speeches about the future of mutantkind feel a bit canned. Or because the actual plot, in which Kevin Bacon almost starts World War III by confusing a few generals, does not feel even remotely plausible. (Grounding this story in the real-life Cuban Missile Crisis actually works against this storyline, because you just can't believe that Kevin Bacon orchestrated these events.) And there are a few outrageously cheesy sequences that try to prop up this storyline, including two separate "nuclear war is scary" montages where we see mushroom clouds and terrifying cartoons, trying to impress on us the danger of nuclear Armageddon. Oh, and now that Bacon has proved he can make a fantastic villain in Super, he doesn't seem to feel any need to prove it a second time.

But those are mostly minor complaints - I'd say X-Men: First Class is 3/4 of a great movie, with a few wobbly segments sandwiched in here and there. And if you've ever been fascinated by the Professor X/Magneto dynamic and wanted to delve more fully into their complicated, intense relationship, then X-Men: First Class is a dream come true. Most of all, X-Men: First Class fuses action and character development, in a way that makes the tragically overused mutant angst feel full of excitement again. Here's hoping this movie sparks a trend.

PlayStation 3 and PSP owners in Europe and the U.S. can now download the freebies Sony promised last month during the PSN outage. Keep in mind everyone trying to download inFamous at once is bound to cause some network congestion.

The house that Sonic built and later remodeled is bringing their A games to E3 this year with Aliens: Colonial Marines and Anarchy Reigns. Binary Domain is their B game, followed by Captain America: Super Soldier and Crush3D. After that the whole alphabet thing falls apart.

Even if they don't have at least one game for every letter of the alphabet, Sega's E3 2011 showing is quite impressive. As far as some of Kotaku's writers are concerned, they could have just showed up with Captain America and Colonial Marines, waved to the crowd, and gone home, but no! Instead they bring a bunch of extra stuff with them, just in case the entire show isn't made up of Kotaku editors.

Stuff like Crush3D, the 3DS version of the perspective-twisting puzzle adventure for the PSP, or Renegade Ops, the downloadable shooter that doesn't seem particular exciting. Sega Rally Online Arcade is already out, so it pretty much doesn't count!

The Guardian Heroes HD re-release looks nifty enough, as does the House of the Dead Overkill: Extended Cut for the PlayStation 3. A new Shinobi game for the 3DS? There's nothing wrong with that.

Rise of Nightmares for the Kinect might be the most interesting title, promising full-body scares using Microsoft's motion sensing controller. I'm a big fan of full-body scares.

And of course it wouldn't be a Sega party without Sonic the Hedgehog, both in Sonic Generations and Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games.

All those and more will be on-hand at Sega's E3 booth for us to sample and taste. Check back next week for more from the floor.

The post-apocalyptic town of Wellspring gets its name from the intricate underground systems pumping water up to the surface, so when a group of bandits threatens to poison it, heads are going to roll, and possibly explode.

It's been a long time since I've been truly excited about a first-person shooter. Mildly interested or somewhat amused, sure, but there's something about id's Rage that has me eagerly anticipating the game's September 13 release date. I'm not sure if it's the scenery, the setting itself, or the many different ways to take out your enemies as demonstrated in this video. The game just speaks to me.

I mean, did you catch the part where the guy throws a knife, the player dodges, and then decapitates the enemy with his own knife? That's what I want to do. It's those sorts of gaming moments I live for.

Anyone else feeling excited?

There wasn't going to be a Gears of War 3 beta last month.

The huge Xbox 360 shooter was simply going to come out in the spring, no beta to precede it. You'd be able to own the full game by now if everyone had stuck to the original plan. Things changed some time late last year. Microsoft delayed the game to the fall, leaving it creators at Epic Games an opportunity they'd wanted: to make a beta.

"We were on track to ship, and so we were nearing completion," Jim Brown, who heads development on the multiplayer portions of the first Gears of War and has resumed that responsibility for the new game, told me recently. "We figured this would be the perfect chance for us to do this. So we just dove in with both feet to do everything to get it out the door. "

Brown convincingly argues that the beta was no mere marketing ploy. He says it has made Gears of War 3 much better.

"There's obviously a huge marketing component," Brown said, "We got our name out there, we got people looking at the game, we got people hands-on playing the game." He's right. The beta was popular and was played by more than a million people while it was live for about a month this past spring.

"But," he added, "this was genuinely an attempt for us to get feedback and try these new processes out. When Gears 2 shipped, it was admittedly a little bit rocky. There were some problems with matchmaking and overall game balance issues that we addressed, certainly, but that was over a series of title updates [read: downloadable patches]. It took us a while to iron out all the wrinkles, and we wanted to make sure we didn't have that initial hump to get over [with Gears 3]."

The beta consisted of four maps and three gameplay modes. Several of the weapons, liked the sawed-off shotgun, were new, as were fundamental gameplay changes like the fact that killed players could re-spawn before the end of a match. (Reminisce by taking a video tour of what was in the beta.)

"This was the perfect chance for us to test-balance our new weapons, to test the new set-up dedicated servers, to test our matchmaking algorithm, to test our point-balancing and new game mechanics," Brown said. "All these things… the new title and ribbon system, the new leveling system, all the stuff that was new to the game, this was a really great test-bed, with over a million people banging on it day-in and day-out, to see what's wrong, we hope, before we get the full game out. "

Some of the tweaks coming out of the beta were the kinds of things you'd expect: altered weapons, revised reward systems. "We changed the headshot damage on one of the rifles," Brown said. "We changed the overall power of another one." They changed the names of some of the ribbons—the accolades that appear for various feats during an online battle—and tweaked some of the awards that were given out. One ribbon reward, called Underdog, infuriated expert players. It could be earned only if you beat a player who was 25 character-levels above you. It was only worth 10 experience points, but day-one players who could play the game well never encountered any players who were 25 levels above them. They couldn't earn that reward and they complained. The result: cut.

Brown said his team at Epic also "identified some pretty serious flaws" in the layouts of some maps. The stats from the beta showed the how people moved through the games down to the individual button press. They could see how the "people in the wild" played the map vs. how the level designers intended for the maps to be played. The designers spotted bad cover arrangements that had players thinking they were covered only to painfully discover they were exposed. Changed. There were places people could sit and simply pick-off other players as they spawned back into the map. Changed. Two of the beta's four maps turned out to have big problems. "I am not shy about saying that Thrashball and Trenches were both flawed for re-spawning game types," Brown said. "We have made pretty significant changes to those maps to try and address that." A specific example: "You could take the top of Thrashball and hold it forever and never come back... So we had to rearrange weapon layouts and cover layouts to balance out that map and make it more playable overall."

There were changes made that you might not expect. Some players thought that Anya, the Gears character who was a playable fighter for the first time in the beta, was "a little more gruff and vulgar" than she should be. "Her lines got toned down and pared back a little bit."

Epic developers studied player data. They played their beta obsessively. They read through the forums. The game's community manager answered more than 50,000 e-mails during the beta period, Brown said. They soaked in the response.

Gamers aren't always right. Game designers know this and they can't make a change just because a part of their game has been criticized. Take the sawed-off shotgun, a new weapon introduced in the Gears 3 beta that Brown's team knew would be controversial. "That was obvious," he said. "It's a weapon that lets you run up to someone, shoot them in the face and they explode. It's binary: you win or you lose." They'd made the weapon for players who aren't experts. "The sawed-off is intended to be for a new player who really isn't that experienced with the game, really isn't that great of a player, but they can still run up to somebody, pull the trigger and they still get that awesome moment where the dude explodes, they get points, ribbons start appearing on the screen, and there's a big celebration. There's this big sense of accomplishment. "

The introduction of the sawed-off in the beta freaked some players out. "We were kind of shocked and surprised at how passionately people felt about it," Brown said. "There were people who thought it should be cut; there were people who said it was the greatest weapons in the game." But the developers stuck to their gun, because they discovered that there were message board threads like that for every weapon in the game. Each was loved by some and hated by others. That, they decided, was a sign of creative success. They'd made guns that appealed to a variety of player-types, each catering to different play styles. They did make some tweaks to the sawed-off, but the uproar about its inclusion didn't discourage them. Beta players found that it could be countered, and that's what mattered. It had its place.

But the most important information they gleaned and the most significant changes that were made were and will probably remain invisible to most Gears players. They involved the game's network infrastructure. Testing that, Brown said, "was really one of the biggest and best things we got out of the beta." Previous Gears games didn't use dedicated servers. They didn't rely on the kind of networking that has to connect match-made players efficiently through a data center and server farm. The popularity of the beta, with more than a million people playing, helped ensure that those systems worked and that, when they failed, they could be fixed. "We made some very significant changes," Brown said, noting that the volume of play was forcing tweaks at their data center that the people at the center had never seen before. During the beta, the Epic team would take part of their game's online systems offline, change settings, change code and make a pile of improvements. "Having those one or two days of downtime on the servers now means we don't have to do it for several weeks after we ship."

Brown considers the beta a huge success. "We learned so much," he said. "There are innumerable changes we've made from code side to content side… so many things that will let this be more successful when we launch it." In fact, Brown said they're now afraid that if they tweak things too much now that people who loved the beta will be angry about those tweaks when the game ships. So they're being careful.

One other thing: The Epic team didn't realize that the beta players were going to love chasing and shooting the game's chickens. Does that mean there will be more chickens in the final game? "You have not even seen the beginning of the chickens," Brown said. "I know there were some doubters in the office and that we were able to throw some extra support on them for the full game, I will say that." He's not sure if he can promise that chickens will be added post-beta, but it sure sounds like those birds are safe from being cut.

Square Enix Products has produced some lovely action figures in its Halo: Reach Play Arts Kai series. Now the company commemorates the tenth anniversary of the Halo franchise with a re-envisioned version of Master Chief and a stunning Spartan Mark V.

Part of the new Halo: Combat Evolved Play Arts Kai series, the new Master Chief figure has been remade with sleek lines and sci-fi style the official announcement calls "iconic of other Square Enix products." While it's unmistakable the hero of Halo one through three, the devil is in the tiny details that lend a distinctive Japanese flavor to the familiar figure.

Both the new Master Chief and black Spartan V will be released later this year, with an asking price of $54.99 apiece. They'll also be on display in prototype form next week at E3 2011, so maybe we'll snap some pictures to help you decide if an action figure is worth that much.

CD Projekt has released update 1.2 for The Witcher 2 on the PC, featuring more than 30 significant changes and fixes to the game, including the ability for Geralt to swap between six different looks via in-game barber shops.